

Journal of a Novel
The East of Eden Letters
Author: John Steinbeck
Narrator: Jonathan Davis
Unabridged: 8 hr 53 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 11/16/2021
Author: John Steinbeck
Narrator: Jonathan Davis
Unabridged: 8 hr 53 min
Format: Digital Audiobook Download
Publisher: Penguin Audio
Published: 11/16/2021
John Steinbeck, born in Salinas, California, in 1902, grew up in a fertile agricultural valley, about 25 miles from the Pacific Coast. Both the valley and the coast would serve as settings for some of his best fiction. In 1919 he went to Stanford University, where he intermittently enrolled in literature and writing courses until he left in 1925 without taking a degree. During the next five years he supported himself as a laborer and journalist in New York City, all the time working on his first novel, Cup of Gold (1929). After marriage and a move to Pacific Grove, he published two California books, The Pastures of Heaven (1932) and To a God Unknown (1933), and worked on short stories later collected in The Long Valley (1938). Popular success and financial security came only with Tortilla Flat (1935), stories about Monterey’s paisanos. A ceaseless experimenter throughout his career, Steinbeck changed courses regularly. Three powerful novels of the late 1930s focused on the California laboring class: In Dubious Battle (1936), Of Mice and Men (1937), and the book considered by many his finest, The Grapes of Wrath (1939). The Grapes of Wrath won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize in 1939. Steinbeck received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1962, and, in 1964, he was presented with the United States Medal of Freedom by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Steinbeck died in New York in 1968. Today, more than 30 years after his death, he remains one of America's greatest writers and cultural figures.
I got halfway through this book--and then decided I would read it in concert with East of Eden. A fantastic five star experience. Steinbeck's editor sent him an oversized bound journal in which to write his next book, and what Steinbeck did was, each morning, write a 'letter' to his editor about the......more
Well, Mr Steinbeck. I go down on my knees before you, Sir. It was you who taught me how to tell a story. You, who are so darn good, yet so vulnerable and humble. What writer would have the guts to admit, 'Although sometimes I have felt I held fire in my hands and spread a page with shining, I have ne......more
Such a great journal. I enjoyed every word. Steinbeck was certainly an interesting man. This book gives us an inside look at how he worked. Myself, not so much a plot-driven devotee, but Steinbeck clearly had a plan and he carried it out to perfection. I admire him for that and respect his process.......more
I’m not sure I’d call myself a Steinbeck fan but I loved East of Eden and decided to read this book after visiting Steinbeck’s hometown, Salinas. The book of letters sheds a great deal of light on Steinbeck’s writing process and perhaps on literary work in general. The book also made me deeply nosta......more
Only someone of the stature of John Steinbeck, flying in the fame of his seminal, Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Grapes of Wrath, could have pulled off publishing a diary maintained through the months he wrote his longest and (in his eyes) best book, East of Eden. The diary was written to his editor P......more
"Full of insights and revelations involving the gladness and terror of writing." —Chicago Sun-Times"A sort of Travels with Charley across a more personal country." —The Boston Globe